10 Disgusting Non-Stories The Media Shamelessly Flogged

Weâ€™ve talked before about the mediaâ€™s penchant for ruining lives and making stuff up. But theyâ€™re so darn good at it that it deserves another look. For every Edward Snowden or Pentagon Papers case, it turns out that there are literally thousands of hacks, churning out articles that are empty trash at best and downright dangerous at worst. From flogging non-stories to ruining careers to driving teenagers to suicide, it seems thereâ€™s no low the media wonâ€™t stoop to in exchange for a quick headline.

10 Mitt Romney and the KKK

Remember Mitt Romney? He was the runner-up in last yearâ€™s elections, and while he may have had many, many faults, he was clearly not a racist supporter of the Ku Klux Klan. But that didnâ€™t stop MSNBC and the Washington Post from trying to portray him as such.

The problem arose when Romney was recorded using the slogan “keep America American.” Within hours, MSNBC gleefully ran an item on it, pointing out that the phrase was originally used in the 1920s as a rallying cry by the KKK. Not long after, the Washington Postpicked up the story and launched their own offensive, triggering a media backlash against Romney and his accidentally-racist ways. Too bad the story was complete bunkum.

9 Gore Vidal—Pedophile

Gore Vidal was an American intellectual, flamboyant bisexual, and award-winning novelist. He was also a staunch defender of convicted abuser Roman Polanski and frequently vacationed in Thailand, a country famous for its sex trade. And, according to headline writers around the world, that makes him a pedophile.

A few weeks back, two of Vidalâ€™s estranged relatives began suggesting Vidal may have had sex with underage men. Rather than looking into these claims or seeing if any hard evidence was on offer, newspapers from The Telegraph to The Guardian instead cheerfully repeated the accusations—turning the speculation of two angry nobodies into a story that swiftly consumed the entire world. Type Gore Vidal into Google now and youâ€™ll be greeted with little more than inflammatory accusations, demolishing the reputation of a dead man.

Now, Vidal may turn out to have been an abuser. But no one in the media has any evidence that he was. And if thereâ€™s one thing in life that never ends well, itâ€™s a speculative media witch hunt.

8 The “Best Friends” Ban

But itâ€™s not just when slandering politicians or dead celebrities that the media behave like total jerks. Sometimes theyâ€™ll simply grab a total non-story and distort it to fit some ridiculous agenda.

Case in point: Earlier this year, Fox News reported on the “controversial decision” of a school in England to ban children from having best friends. Like the Daily Mail before them, their report painted a picture of a world where political correctness had gone so mad that children werenâ€™t even allowed to be children anymore. It was a big, bizarre, unbelievable story—for the very good reason that it was also complete nonsense.

In reality, the headmaster of a school had given an interview to The Telegraph where he had echoed comments made by other teachers the year before, suggesting children should have “lots of good friends” instead of one very close one. He repeatedly stressed this wasnâ€™t school policy and never would be, but something he merely thought was a good idea. In fact, his interview comes across as sensible, insightful and thoughtful . . . exactly the opposite, in other words, to the journalists who reported it.

7 The Pentagon Hates Christians

In April this year, Fox News reporter Todd Starnes found the scoop of a lifetime. According to reports heâ€™d received, the Pentagon was preparing to allow the court-martialling of Christians who engaged in proselytizing. Starnes wrote up his report and published it. Then right-wing website Brietbart got hold of it, and things went into stupidity overdrive.

Running the story under the headline “Pentagon May Court Martial Soldiers Who Share Christian Faith,” the website claimed all Christianity was under attack—a claim dozens of right-wing bloggers picked up and ran with. The resultant furor produced the narrative that anti-Christian extremists had turned the Pentagon into a hotbed of violent political correctness.

It wasnâ€™t until the Pentagon issued a clarification printed in several newspapers that it finally became apparent the whole thing was a load of nonsense. The original “shocking report” simply re-stated rules that frown on forcibly converting fellow soldiers. These rules explicitly state that itâ€™s okay to evangelize or share whatever faith you have, so long as youâ€™re not a jerk about it. In other words, the same non-controversial policy theyâ€™ve had in place for years.

6 Transgender Bathroom Harassment

A month or so ago, sworn enemies of political correctness got the story theyâ€™d been waiting for. According to Fox News, “a male student” at a Colorado school who “claims to be transgender” had been “harassing” girls in the bathroom. They further reported that “when parents complained, school officials said the boy’s rights as a transgender trumped their daughters’ privacy rights.”

If youâ€™ve noticed the absurd number of quotation marks in the paragraph above, thatâ€™s because weâ€™ve taken care to quote Fox directly on the parts of their report they simply made up. When Salon and a transgender advocacy group investigated the claim, they found that a female transgender student had actually used the girlâ€™s bathroom—being, yâ€™know, female and all—and no one had complained.

The schoolâ€™s Superintendent explicitly stated no harassment had occurred, but that didnâ€™t stop the story from spreading like wildfire. So, basically, Fox News turned a random teenage girl into an international hate figure for no other reason than “because.” Well, that makes it all okay then.

5 The Homophobic Tip

In 2013, most of us are deeply aware that public homophobia isnâ€™t exactly cool. So when ex-Marine-turned-NJ-waitress Dayna Morales received an anti-gay rant in lieu of a tip, plenty of news sites jumped on the story. They were a little bit too hasty—reports now indicate that Morales made the whole thing up.

The family who supposedly left the note came forward with a credit card statement and customer receipt showing they really did leave a tip. Fast forward a couple of news cycles, and Morales was suspended from her job after other employees revealed she repeatedly made-up victim stories as a way of getting attention.

At time of writing, this story still hasnâ€™t dragged its sorry carcass into the grave and died, but events seem to indicate Moralesâ€™s credibility is taking a bashing. But on the bright side, if it turns out that she did fake the whole thing then sheâ€™ll have struck a real blow for equality: by proving that LGBT people can be equally as jerky as everyone else.

4 Pushing a Teenager to Suicide

Imagine youâ€™ve just heard that a 16-year-old girl has been stabbed to death by a classmate. Whatâ€™s your first reaction? If you said “smear the memory of the dead girl with allegations of bullying,” congratulations: there may be a job in media for you.

In 1991, Barbara Glover put a knife through the heart of Diane Watson during a fight at their Scottish school. Diane died almost immediately and Glover went to jail, leaving their families to deal with this horrible tragedy in peace. Wait, did we say “peace”? We meant the opposite.

Around 18 months after Dianeâ€™s death, two Scottish newspapers published a hatchet job on the dead girl, falsely labeling her a bully and suggesting she had treated her murderer snobbishly. Since Scottish law says you canâ€™t defame dead people, Dianeâ€™s parents could do nothing about this. The articles kept on coming, horrifying the family, particularly Diane’s younger brother Alan.

According to the parents, in 1993, this constant scrutiny over his sister drove 15-year old-Alan to commit suicide. He was found clutching the defamatory articles in one hand, along with a note saying “sorry.” On the day of his funeral, a columnist at one of the papers published yet another column about Diane.

3 The Hillsborough Disaster

In 1989, a series of incompetent decisions and police stupidity led to the Hillsborough Disaster—a horrific incident that saw 96 English soccer fans crushed to death when a Sheffield stadium became dangerously overcrowded. In the aftermath, it was clear someone was at fault. After all, police officers had violently stopped supporters from escaping the overcrowded areas, and ambulances had been routed away from the injured. So reporters for UK tabloid newspaper The Sun took one look at this official incompetence and decided to blame . . . the grieving fans.

Published four days after the disaster, their front page was breath-taking in both its inaccuracy and offensiveness. Despite literally no evidence existing to support their claims, the paper reported that those in the stadium had robbed their fellow fans’ corpses, attacked police officers trying to help, and urinated on emergency service crews. Suddenly, hundreds of people whoâ€™d lost friends and relatives in the tragedy found themselves the target of undeserved blame. It was the worst type of non-story imaginable—unfounded, sensationalist and deeply hurtful to many, many people.

2 The McMartin Abuse Case

In 1983, a mother accused the staff of McMartin preschool in California of sexually abusing her child. Police of course had to take such matters seriously, but the mother soon added a series of allegations that were increasingly ridiculous. The family in charge of the school, the Buckeys, allegedly ran a satanic coven. They not only abused children, according to the accuser—they sacrificed babies, drank blood, and taught each other to fly. It turned out that this mother was an alcoholic paranoid schizophrenic.

Faced with such nonsense, the media obviously displayed the healthy skepticism for which American journalism is famous . . . by which we mean they declared the Buckeys guilty without trial and stirred up one of the biggest moral panics in history.

In a post-trial analysis, David Shaw of the LA Times found reams of evidence that local station KABC-TV, ABC national, and the Times itself “frequently plunged into hysteria, sensationalism and . . . a lynch mob syndrome.” Stories presuming the Buckeyâ€™s guilt were splashed across front pages, while the damning amounts of evidence supporting their innocence went entirely unreported.

At one point, the media were even happily repeating claims of mass animal sacrifices, secret tunnels under the school, and trips in submarines as fact, despite their obvious grounding in fantasy. All told, this media orgy of gratuitous guff resulted in Ray Buckey spending five years in prison and a trial that wasted over $15 million of public funds.

1 Anti-Roma Hysteria

Just occasionally, you get a racist stereotype so inexplicably widespread that it refuses to die, even in the 21st century. One example is the nonsense idea of a Jewish blood libel. A similar one is the belief that shady Roma families abduct Aryan children.

Earlier this year, it emerged that Greek social services had removed a blonde, blue-eyed girl known as Maria from her Roma family, believing they had abducted her. DNA tests showed she wasnâ€™t related to the family, and there was no way a blonde kid could possibly be Roma by birth, right? So the media dusted off their big book of offensive stereotypes and set about causing a gigantic racist panic.

Amid sensationalist reports like this one in the Daily Mail—which managed to mix racism and anti-pedophile hysteria into a single, offensive column—police across Europe began a hostile crackdown on Roma families, snatching their children away into the night on the flimsiest of evidence. In Ireland, two blonde children were abducted from separate families—only for DNA tests to prove their Roma mothers and fathers were indeed their biological parents. In Italy, government ministers called for the forced search of all Roma camps to identify missing children. According to the New York Times, the mediaâ€™s hysteria resulted in an upsurge in racist attacks across Europe—despite the original report being completely flawed.

Yeah, it turned out that Maria was Roma all along, her mother having given her to the couple in Greece due to her own crippling poverty. But hey, why bother running a fact check when itâ€™s just so much easier to whip up some race-hate?

Morris is a freelance writer and newly-qualified teacher, still naively hoping to make a difference in his students' lives. You can send your helpful and less-than-helpful comments to his email, or visit some of the other websites that inexplicably hire him.